182 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



perience. They were never learned. In one sense the animal 

 does not know how to do them, viz. : in the sense of having learned 

 to do them. It does them moved by an impulse, rather than de- 

 terminate thought. It obeys a mere blind, but cogent propensity, 

 rather than a rational conclusion, viz. : one deduced by logical 

 processes from ascertained and definite premises. These mere 

 propensities arise in, and then reach on, are apparatus, or mechan- 

 ism, which is often perfect at birth, or before it. In such cases as 

 those, in which the animal does not begin the performance of cer- 

 tain acts or to manifest certain tendencies until late in life, the 

 reason is to be found in the lateness of development of the ap- 

 propriate mechanism through which the acts in question are ac- 

 complished. The case is in nowise different from that in which the 

 apparatus is perfect at birth. No matter how late in life it is that 

 the animal begins to do what it does, this much is clear, that the 

 apparatus was not developed by educative processes, as is so gen- 

 erally the case in man. To all appearances the development is 

 spontaneous. The animal seems to acquiesce, without purpose, and 

 hence unconsciously its capacities to do. It does whatever it does 

 as a rule, irom the first, with automatic precision. But while this 

 is the rule with the lower animals, the contrary is true of man. 

 He has the smallest possible stock of instinctive or automatic 

 acts to begin with, and those few of the lowest and simplest kind. 

 Whatever he does or knows he has to leani to do or know as a 

 rule, by or through slow, educative processes. 



The point in this case is as follows : As respects the lower ani- 

 mals, they are provided by their Creator from the first with com- 

 plete mechanisms, fitted to reach in a determinate way to various 

 stimuli, external and internal, while the development and perfec- 

 tion in structure and working of the nervous mechanisms in man 

 are conditional on their determinate purposive use or education. If 

 not so used, or, in other words, educated, they are never devel- 

 oped. Hence we may have ignorant and incapable men, as com- 

 pared with each other, but not ignorant and incapable animals, as 

 compared with their kind. Hence arises a duty on the part of men 

 to develop themselves, and if they do not discharge that duty we 

 Uame them, as in the scripture parable of the talents. But not 



